Scribing Sue

Scribing Sue

There was something about Sue Harper, always something simple, which took my breath away.

It happened on morning bus rides, watching her flushed face glow before a frosted window. It escaped me on Cliffshore Avenue while her auburn hair flailed as she cycled past on summer evenings. I've logged and listed the countless reasons Sue affected me so strongly and the ways she changed me. She has lived through my writings for years.

But it wasn't always that way.

Before I moved to town, I had very few outlets to the world. I would grunt. I would speak with my eyes. I would wait for simple questions needing simple answers. My parents tried to force me to learn sign language, but I refused to stick it out. The process was too stifling. Using signs didn't make me feel weak, or like I was less than other mutes. The notion was just a waste when my primal methods had worked without hitch. After a month of lessons I stopped caring and began to scrawl ideas down on paper, just enough to get by. It quickly became depressing-getting my base points across from sticky notes, napkins, bare hands.

Then I met Sue.

In an instant, my lost voice felt bigger a burden then it ever had. Never before had I felt such a longing to say what my body would never allow me. And I realized my sounds and jumbled words wouldn't cut it. I had to get better. She made me need to get better. In a near perfect way, Sue introduced me to my greatest outlet: journals. She crafted me into the articulate writer I've become. It's almost too cruel an irony that the girl who saved my life has never known the truth.

Everything about Sue infected my mind and inspired my words, but not in typical teenage ways. Never fantasies of flesh atop some withered peak overlooking bright cityscapes, the windows down and hands close. I refused to see Sue in lieu of a lustful prize. It was always with a certain reverence. Calming visions of her brushing by in the halls or talking with her pack.